Why should we care about Gordon Allport?

A talk given at the March 14th, 2001 Allport Award Dinner to the
St. Olaf Psychology Department Faculty and Students

By Chuck Huff

Gordon Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana on November 11th,
1897. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate. He was not a
psychology major. He taught sociology in Turkey, then returned to
Harvard to learn how to teach Psychology. After receiving his Ph.D.,
he traveled to Berlin, Hamburg, and Cambridge for additional study,
spent 4 years teaching at Dartmouth, and returned to Harvard for the
rest of his career.

Interesting, but hardly exceptional. Our own Olaf Millert seems
more widely traveled and has a more interesting personal history. So,
we must look elsewhere for why we should care about Gordon
Allport.

He published widely, including books on The Nature of
Prejudice (1954), The Individual and His Religion (1950),
and The Psychology of Rumor (1947). I classify these
publications as all Social Psychology, and so I like Gordon Allport.
But the center of his work was in the theory of Personality. His
books in this area include Personality: A Psychological
Interpretation (1937), Becoming: Basic Considerations for a
Psychology of Personality (1955), Pattern and Growth in
Personality (1961), and Letters from Jenny (1965). The
earlier works contain colons in their titles. This suggests that he
was still working on a succinct explanation for his major area of
work. Later, he had no qualms about using an odd title such as
Letters from Jenny, and allowing his readers to unpack the
implications of that title.

So, we have lots of books, and many more journal articles. Should
we care? One way to answer this question is to ask "Do other people
care?" I tried to find this out by doing a short search through the
Social Science Citation Index. For those unfamiliar with this lovely
tool, I offer a short description. The text figure to the right here
is
a sample page from the citation index, in 1997. The bold items are
works by Sigmund Freud. The items listed under each work are works
published in or near 1997 that cited a particular work by Dr.
Freud.

To measure the influence of Gordon Allport, I looked up the number
of citations he received from 1988 to 1998. I chose these years
because the volumes of the Social Science Citation Index were
available for these years. In the figure below I provide these
numbers in a graph, comparing them with comparable figures from
Sigmund Freud, Albert Bandura, and B. F. Skinner. I choose these
comparison authors because I could think of their names last night
while I was in the library.

First, a caveat. I generated these numbers by measuring the
column-inches devoted to each psychologist in each issue of the
index. I rounded these numbers off, rounding up when there was more
than 1/4 inch of column devoted to citations to the psychologist. I
then simply multiplied them by 10, since inspection indicated that
there were about 10 citations per column-inch. This all took me about
20 minutes.

You can see from this figure that Freud outclasses them all. I
suspect this is a function of citations from a wide variety of social
scientists, rather than being driven mostly by psychologists. Bandura
comes in a respectable second, and his influence seems to be growing
over time. Allport and Skinner, our two Harvard professors, bring up
the rear. Still, in terms of influence on psychology, Skinner does
not count as bad company.

So, here is one somewhat stilted and incomplete picture of Gordon
Allport's influence on psychology. It certainly seems respectable,
and reflects his high place in the pantheon of our discipline. But I
think we can learn something from what is missing from this analysis
too. Certainly the relative influence on psychology of Skinner and
Freud is not well tracked by this chart. Whole cottage industries of
research have been based on various pieces of Skinner's work, and
some of them rarely cite Skinner any more, but simply live in the
empirical milieu he originated.

It
is the same with Gordon Allport. Research on prejudice by current
social psychologists rarely cites Allport except as a historical
footnote. Current researchers are much more likely to cite
foundational work by cognitive psychologists like Eleanor Rosch
(1978). But social psychologists who study prejudice work in the same
mine that Allport originally prospected. And they are asking
remarkably similar questions. It was Allport, after all, who pointed
out that prejudice was structured by categorization and that
categorization was influenced by social context. This began the much
discussed and researched area of the contact hypothesis.

But let me mention two other ideas of Allport's that have become
part of the air we breathe as psychologists. First, self-esteem. For
Allport the development of self-esteem was a central issue for early
childhood. This is the sense of pride that comes from recognition
that one can do things on one's one. First, let's note that Albert
Bandura has appropriated this idea in his phrase Self-Efficacy
(1997), and so some of the citations to Bandura we noted are really
citations to an area of work in which Allport was a pioneer. Second,
we can deplore together the self-esteem industry that has recently
emerged (and seems, thankfully, to be waning). In this popular
distortion of Allport's idea, self-esteem becomes everything to
psychology, its alpha and omega. All things are forgiven and all
things are justified as long as they contribute to self-esteem.
Allport certainly never dreamed of this distortion, and his complex
set of developmental tasks included much more nuance than this. But
in the rush to self-esteem, it has been forgotten. Still, in this
way, Allport has had as much influence on popular psychology as has
Freud -- and with a similar level of distortion of his theories.

The second item I want to mention is a methodological one. Talk
about methodology after dinner is a dangerous occupation. It is
likely to serve more as a soporific than a stimulant. But I will
hazard a few sentences. Although he was no friend of Freud's depth
psychology, Gordon Allport was convinced, along with Freud, that what
Freud called "the American approach to psychology" was not only
boring, but misleading. Compiling ranks of statistics, averaged
across individuals, leads us to what Dan McAdams (1996) has called
the psychology of the stranger. It describes everyone in general and
no one in particular. It misses the personal meaning of life's
events, and the individual ways of responding to life's events that
Allport called traits. Allport called this statistical approach to
understanding human nature the nomothetic method, and contrasted its
emptiness and aridity to the richness of the idiographic approach --
an approach centered on the meanings and stories of the individual.
To Allport, people are both lawful and unique. If you want to see how
alive this individual approach is today, come to Dan McAdams' talk
this spring when he visits us. Of all the work that Gordon Allport
did, this issue is still the most live one today. It is debated in
much the same terms as Allport set it out fifty years ago. But it
still has the vigor of fresh ideas infused into it by current
theorists like McAdams (1999).

So here we have several ideas from Gordon Allport that have
insinuated themselves into our current psychological dialogue. I
could easily extend this list. The idea of the personal disposition
that Allport introduced in 1961 ended up becoming a foil for the rise
of attribution theory and the straw man for the rise of research on
the fundamental attribution error. Allport's work on intrinsic and
extrinsic approaches to religion was the foundation for a plethora of
scaling studies of religious styles, much of which defined itself as
extensions, modifications, or rejections of Allport's original
approach. Complaints about the medical model in psychology today are
made in terms that surely echo Allport's complaints about
behaviorism.

So, for psychologists today, Allport's work is akin in its
influence to Skinner's. It is a part of the air we breathe. And we
can pay homage to him by doing work in almost any area of psychology
while being thoughtful about its relation to the whole person. His
influence will extend into our work in every area, if only as a
reminder of what we are missing.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Darla Frandrup and her faithful crew of student workers
for helping prepare the figures for this talk. Thanks to Reference
Librarian Elizabeth Hutchins for loaning me a ruler to measure column
inches, and for acting interested. Thanks to Nathan DeWall '02 for
reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this talk. Any errors
or inconsistencies are someone else's fault.